Secret Police For The Vote. No Good.
We Need Reform, Not The Stasi and KKK Monitoring U.S. Elections
Even though court case after court case and audit after audit shows voter fraud doesn’t exist, we may see a special police unit deployed in Florida to root out the bad guys. By bad guys I think they mean Democrats and people of color who will turn out big in 2022 to keep the chaos out of power. Wonder if this Florida Stasi would consider arresting the Mad King? His Big Lie commits election fraud in just about every breathing moment.
Probably not. That’d force the Republican goons who are dismantling the vote Red State by Red State to admit that Joe Biden is correct. They are in fact standing with the Bull Connor types of our Jim Crow past. No matter the “who us?” harrumphing you’re reading from columnists carrying water for the right, this is all part of ongoing outright voter suppression facilitated by the Roberts court.
Funny how the folks foaming at the mouth over “socialist” Democrats are forever ready to send out the secret police, build walls and prisons, and “lock up” in the name of preserving freedom. I mean, nothing says freedom like razor wire and a knock at your door by armed men.
Who is truly trying and succeeding at turning the U.S. into an authoritarian oligarchy? Sorry Mitch, not the Democrats.
Well, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin excluded.
Rain, Snow, and California on Fire
As La Nina snow piles up from the Sierra to the Rockies, Big Sur conflagrates. Californians face a climate-changed state where homes in the urban interface routinely will be consumed throughout a year-round fire season. Elizabeth Weil reporting in the New York Times offers this sobering observation.
“When I called around to fire experts this fall for an update on the situation, the response was grim. People started talking to me about zombie towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills — towns almost guaranteed to incinerate. The darkest statements came from the most knowledgeable people. ‘I do think that we’re going to have significant community destruction,’ one retired senior official told me. ‘We are going to be playing just a completely defensive game. I don’t know that we will ever get ahead of it until we have so much destruction that we kind of eliminated the problem.’”
Weil’s article, “This Isn’t The California I Married,” is lengthy and worth every minute of your time. It nails the NOW we are living in Arizona and the West while public policy is stuck in early 20th century fire suppression.
Bottom Line: Fire is Forever. Old thinking isn’t working. We need to adapt at every level.
Bring On The Windmills
Arizona Public Service (APS) threatens to sue over state regulation and its supposed impact on shareholders (read CEO) returns. Meanwhile, states like Iowa lead the way with wind power. The Des Moines Register reports Berkshire-Hathaway-owned MidAmerican Energy will invest in technology necessary to generate enough power from sustainable sources, mainly wind, to meet Iowa’s needs. That’s RED STATE Iowa throwing coal overboard.
Yeah, I know. Iowa is rural and the largest metro area pushes just 900,000 thousand, not three million. However, drive across I-80 and head south to the Plains and you’ll see tons of windmills churning. I don’t see tons of windmills or solar farms throughout Arizona.
That’s a missed opportunity from years of bending to APS’ control and their political games packing the Arizona Corporation Commission. APS is all about raising prices and keeping its massive Palo Verde nuke plant operating. It poor mouths while lining the pockets of past chairman Don Brandt.
The last time I looked, Warren Buffett doesn’t back losers. Arizonans deserve better than APS.
Coyotes and Cartels… In Canada… An Awful Outcome
No state (well, maybe Texas) demonizes immigrants more than Arizona. It’s Red Meat for Doug Ducey and any Republican politician who needs to pad their law and order bona fides. “Chaos at our Southern Border” is a go-to line for the FOX News crowd and throws a fear switch inside the tiny brains of Americans who can’t grasp that we’re all immigrants.
Here’s a twist. A Florida man named Steve Shand was arrested for smuggling immigrants from India into Canada.
In a heartbreaking tragedy, a man, woman, teenager and infant froze to death when Shand allegedly abandoned them in snow and subzero temps at the North Dakota-Canadian Border. Mounties rescued immigrants from Shand’s group wandering across the snowscape. Some had been walking for 11 hours. Again, Shand is from Florida, not “the Mexican cartels.” Still, the story sounds familiar.
Southern Border, Northern Border, Texas, California, North Dakota, Montana, Maine, the “where” doesn’t matter. People looking for better will take risks you and I can’t possibly understand or judge.
Stop demonizing these folks. Stop with the “border security” B.S. and figure out how to do this safely and with national security protected. Every minute you put politics over people is another opportunity for the real demons at the borders, people like “Florida Man” Steve Shand.
Uncomfortably Funny
Moses Storm’s debut on HBO MAX made me laugh while feeling completely uncomfortable. Storm’s bio says he’s a writer, actor, host, and he’s all of that laced with a creepy edginess cut from a life that is his act.
In “Trash White,” Storm lays out growing up poor with five siblings and their single Mom. Storm says his parents operated a “failed cult” that scammed no money while nearly pushing them onto the streets. Mom holds the family together housed in, among other places, a school bus. Rather than get a real job, Mom has her kids dumpster diving for food while she comes up with audacious schemes to score cash. Storm’s bit on her attempt to fool Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Videos is priceless.
Funny right? Yeah, except Storm effectively weaves a serious guilt trip into this act. Like, characterizing his Mom’s scams as last ditch, hopelessly desperate plays of a woman sentenced by America to a permanent underclass. You’d think ripping off Funniest Videos is stupid. Moses sees a clear logic that would empower his Mom and beat a system rigged to keep its boot on her neck.
Life through Storm’s lens is humorous and cringy and eye-opening all at once. It’s Poverty 101. Take the course on HBO Max.
Here’s Some Great Reporting
WaPo scores with two tremendous data pieces. The most impressive catalogues every member of congress who owned a slave. Spoiler alert: the North is not clean. The Post also dissected the New Great Migration as American Blacks return South in search of a more inclusive world.
If you haven’t listened to NPR’s Steve Inskeep’s takedown of the Mad King’s delusion… It’s worth the full seven plus minutes, as is the follow-up reporting from Margaret Sullivan on Inskeep’s clinical use of the “Truth Sandwich.”
And Finally…
Nothing, and I mean nothing short of World Peace, was better than watching the Cardinals meltdown in Los Angeles last Monday night. It was an epic, COLOSSALLY EPIC, spanking made all the more enjoyable by utter ineptitude from top to bottom.
So much for all the midseason whining about disrespect by the national media’s alleged failure to anoint Arizona the new “America’s Team.”
That’s cute. How very Arizona. How very Bidwill.
Too bad we built them a stadium and wrote a blank check to underwrite more Bidwill scamming. Any family that would literally steal a championship trophy is getting what it deserves.
Well, there’s always next year… say the losers.